Isn’t Marxism discredited as a political philosophy? How many of those who identify with the ideal of socialism today have actually read and followed even one page of the fifty volumes of the Marx-Engels collected works? My answers: yes and not many. Yet, Marxism shows no sign of dying out; it lives on in a variety of political movements and branches of academic and cultural life. The basic ideas that underlie Marxism pre-existed Marx, and would have existed without his writings, and are continually reborn and propagated among people who know nothing of Marx for a straightforward reason: because such ideas correspond with how most people experience everyday life. For the average person, the free market’s hard edges are easy to see, its benefits are more subtle.